For a long time, NVMe SSDs were the high end option; as the high end option they cost more than SATA SSDs of the same capacity, and SATA SSDs were generally available in higher capacity than NVMe SSDs (at least at prices you wanted to pay). This is why my home desktop wound up with a storage setup with a mirrored pair of 2 TB NVMe SSDs (which felt pretty indulgent) and a mirrored pair of 4 TB SATA SSDs (which felt normal-ish). Today, for reasons outside the boundary of this entry , I wound up casually looking to see how available large SSDs were. What I expected to find was that large-capacity SATA SSDs would now be reasonably available and not too highly priced, while NVMe SSDs would top out at perhaps 4TB and high prices.

This is not what I found, at least at some large online retailers. Instead, SATA SSDs seem to have almost completely stagnated at 4 TB, with capacities larger than that only available from a few specialty vendors at eye-watering prices. By contrast, 8 TB NVMe SSDs seem readily available at somewhat reasonable prices from mainstream drive vendors like WD (they aren't inexpensive but they're not unreasonable given the prices of 4 TB NVMe, which is roughly the price I remember 4 TB SATA SSDs being at). This makes me personally sad, because my current home desktop has more SATA ports than M.2 slots or even PCIe x1 slots.

(You can get PCIe x1 cards that mount a single NVMe SSD, and I think I'd get somewhat better than SATA speeds out of them. I have one to try out in my office desktop , but I haven't gotten around to it yet .)

At one level this makes sense. Modern motherboards have a lot more M.2 slots than they used to , and I speculated several years ago that M.2 NVMe drives would eventually be cheaper to make than 2.5" SSDs . So in theory I'm not surprised that probable consumer (lack of) demand has basically extinguished SATA SSDs above 4 TB. In practice, I am surprised and it feels disconcerting for NVMe SSDs to now look like the 'mainstream' choice.

(This is also potentially inconvenient for work, where we have a bunch of ZFS fileservers that currently use 4 TB 2.5" SATA SSDs (an update from their original 2 TB SATA SSDs). If there are no reasonably priced SATA SSDs above 4 TB, then our options for future storage expansion become more limited. In the long run we may have to move to U.2 to get hotswappable 4+ TB SSDs. On the other hand, apparently there are inexpensive M.2 to U.2 adapters, and we've done worse sins with our fileservers.)